Book of the Year

The book I finished yesterday was SO GOOD! This is a history book, told in stories and digressions and investigations and research, very much non-linear. Not at all my usual style. In fact, it took me a while to get into it - I kept it on my kindle for longer than the three week library checkout period, and read and listened to some other books between starting and finishing it. But it gripped me, even from the beginning. I just found it hard to sit down and read straight through - it lent itself to more piecemeal reading, partly because it is not a linear narrative. 

An object, passed down through a series of black women, inspires an exploration of what life was like for these women. But beyond a gripping and at times heartbreaking close look at black families' lives down the centuries, the book provides incredible context, from the origins of the South Carolina colonies to how pecan trees are propagated, in a few number of pages. The writing is luminous, not a word wasted. 

And that's not all! The author writes of the power of objects and story-telling, in a powerful demonstration of why these things matter.

So many levels! So much research! So much love and heartbreak! All in a non-fiction academic history book, jammed with footnotes, which was partially funded by a federal government grant to the arts. Way to go, my federal government!

Runner up, non-fiction:

This book I heartily recommend as an audiobook. True confessions, this book was written by, and the audiobook is performed by, my neighbor, friend, and storyteller teacher, Noa Baum. This is both her personal story, and the story of the heartbreak that is Israel, the land eponymously twice-promised. She does voices and accents in her performance of the audiobook. Again, I could not make it through this book quickly, but visited it periodically over several months. But it is fabulous, and heartbreaking, as there are no answers.

Runner up, fiction:

This book is listed under "children". It took me about three to four hours to read, and it has no actual sex, so I guess it is not YA. It tells the story of a girl left behind as everyone leaves her town, in contemporary America. Self-sufficiency, courage, resourcefulness, sorrow, it's all there. It pays explicit homage to the Island of the Blue Dolphins, one of my favorite books of all time. I loved this book, and couldn't put it down once I started it. Well worth the quick trip.

I read/ listened to more than 180 books this year, guys, but these three stand head and shoulders above the crowd. I think I'll probably browse back through the list again, and maybe offer some other recommendations.

Still Masked

These were surprisingly fiddly
and difficult to make

I ran across this, my favorite ornament, (handmade by me) from last year. Note how it says "2020"? How naive of me! What optimism we had, with vaccines on the horizon and a new, competent, president peacefully taking office after only a few days of uncertainty.

Yesterday, I read many articles about what is happening with Omicron, maybe more than is healthy. I came away with the horrible feeling that we will all get the virus. It's inevitable, we can't protect enough to avoid it. There is a very good chance we (vaxed and boosted) will end up fine after some unpleasantness, but the unpleasantness is coming and there is nothing we can do to stop it.

I also came away with useful tips on masking, to do my best to postpone the unpleasantness. Tip #1: use an N95, or a KN95. If the latter, make sure to verify the mask labelled "KN95" is truly that. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a good way to verify the certification of masks. The best I can do is look for reviews or on the company website. I've bought both KN95 and surgical-style (pleated) masks from Maskc, because I really want to have my mask coordinated and stylish. They are sold as "single use" but definitely I re-use them.

Just some I've gotten from Maskc

 

If not using an N95 or KN95, double-masking is the way to go. The recommended method is to put a paper, disposable, surgical-style mask on the bottom layer (with the corners tucked together) and then a cloth mask over it. The bottom layer absorbs your moisture, and the top layer generally makes a better seal than the surgical-style. 

I was away last week, and during the week news got progressively worse, so I double-masked on the way home. It was fine, though I prefer the layer touching my face to be of cloth. The masks I made that I still wear have either silk or very soft cotton on the bottom layer. But for anything other than casual exposure, I'll either wear the KN95 or double mask.

So now, the question is, how do I make N95-style ornaments? Got to think on it.

Satisfied

I'll never be satisfied!

I've been embarked on an odyssey of mindful eating attempts. One of the main goals of this is to reach a point where I know not only "what" but "how much" I want to eat, I eat just that, and then I stop. Having just one exquisite but tiny little hand-crafted chocolate, for example, carefully selected from a free display, and then walking on, satisfied. Or, more prosaically, dishing out a small portion of one of my favorite dinners at home and then not even finishing that, because I'm satisfied. I truly do not want more.

As if.

As an experienced dieter, I have encountered various descriptions of this holy grail over the years. All of them are about how to think and act around food, and only go lightly on what to actually eat. No food lists or meal plans. Just paying attention to how much and what you eat.

I think there is a lot to this notion of listening to your body and acting on it. I picked up a book years ago, The Beck Diet Solution, with a Cognitive Based Therapy approach to eating, marketed as "learn to think like a thin person"! (This book was very influential in my starting this blog back in 2010, as one of the tenets was to have a diet buddy. There is still a link to the site over on the right.) There were a lot of useful exercises - self-experiments - to do involving learning how to recognize what we actually feel in our bodies, versus all the layers of thoughts and emotions we overlay on food. For example, she instructs you to skip a meal and check in on hunger at regular intervals, to remind yourself what hunger really feels like, while also discovering that hunger is not an emergency, you won't die, people live for weeks without eating anything. Also, to eat very slowly, setting down the fork between bites, and writing down how you feel before, during, and after. Make a daily plan in advance of all meals, and assess afterwards how you did. I found all of these exercises useful. Ultimately, though, the CBT approach relies on logical self-talk ("I would rather weigh less than eat this cupcake") in a way that requires self-discipline and self-control. After a while, it just gets tiring. It's a never-ending grind. Sigh.

Several years later, I discovered the Summer Tomato, a much more joyful approach to how to eat. Created by The Foodist, the basic approach was to only eat Real Food that tastes awesome (thus fresh tomatoes only in the summer), which requires cooking for yourself. Further, eat mindfully, exercise, and listen to your body. All good stuff, and reading her book several times, reading her blog, and listening to her podcast really did start to change my relationship to food. It wasn't a fight, because if it was a fight, you couldn't win. For me, it was still a struggle to lose or maintain my weight, but I definitely upgraded my food choices and learned to appreciate my food much more. She offered a week-long video course on mindful eating that I subscribed to. The main things I got out of that were to slow way down - fork down between bites - and to chew thoroughly before swallowing. And eliminate distractions while eating - tune in fully to the physical experience of eating and how it makes you feel. She promised the magic state of knowing exactly what and how much to eat I described up top as the result of fully embracing this approach. I never reached nirvana, but I started to make peace with where I was.

Somewhere along the way I started meditating, and I subscribed to the Ten Percent Happier app, where I am still a happy customer. They have a course on Mindful Eating, with Judson Brewer, who is an addiction specialist. I took that course, which goes deeper into the mindfulness approach than the Summer Tomato course. From there, I subscribed to Brewer's own pricey app, Eat Right Now. That had an intense month-long course on mindful eating. Some approaches I've learned from Brewer (that also work for things like anxiety and pain) are breaking the habit loop, RAIN, and disenchantment. Habit loops are something I knew about, but participating in the course helped me specifically note habits and try to modify them. RAIN (recognize, acknowledge, investigate, note) is a meditation technique where you turn in towards an unpleasant sensation (cravings, in the case of mindful eating), and explore what you are feeling with kind curiosity. This is called "surfing the urge", knowing that it won't last. Disenchantment comes from exploring your body after eating whatever, and really feeling in your body whether it feels good. I had some success with these things. I recognize a habit much more readily now, and much more of my eating is a conscious choice, though not always a wise decision. I was sometimes successful at surfing my urges, but often my urge seems to be driven from deep within me and doesn't dissipate after ten minutes or so, as the technique is geared towards. Instead, I might drive to the supermarket to buy ice cream, because I have an idée fixe that just won't go away. That's where disenchantment comes in - after eating, I can explore how my body really feels. As I started to use this technique, imagine my surprise that I can eat an awful lot of ice cream before my body starts to feel bad. But, there is a point where it does actually not feel very good. Hmm...

Then I stumbled on Corinne Crabtree, and her pricey on-line No BS weightloss course. She has taken bits and pieces of all of the approaches above and put it together in a way that really speaks to me. She is profane and down-to-earth. The basic approach is eat when you are hungry and stop when you are satisfied (which is usually less than "full). We are fat because we overeat (eat when we are not hungry or have reached satisfied), and there are three reasons we overeat:

• Lack of body awareness
• Failure to feel our feelings
• Allowing our habit brain to take over

It's all about self-discovery, no shame, only data to explore. I've been through her video course, and some of her supplemental courses (eg, "Binge Better").  I listen to some of her podcasts, participate in her Facebook group, and almost daily use her planning and assessment worksheets which take about 10 minutes to do. There is definitely a cult of personality around Corinne, and I love that she reaches a population that is unlikely to follow my path of CBT and meditation and other approaches on the edge of woo-woo. She teaches habit loops, body awareness, and even how to feel your feelings, to a really wide audience that might not otherwise hear about these things. And I'm not being superior here: the way she talks about them are very useful for me as well.

For the past month, ever since I covered up the numbers on the scale for my daily weigh-in, I've been really tuning in to try to find "satisfied". I've jettisoned any goals around pounds, instead focusing on what and how much I'm eating - but in a loving and investigative way, not in a restrictive way. I've got "hungry" down pretty well, and I feel like I'm making progress towards finding satisfied. Late nights continue to be an issue for me, but it feels like progress towards being what I want to be, someone who eats what she wants, in the amounts she wants, and is at a healthy and attractive weight. 

My meditation app, Ten Percent Happier, is having a weeklong new challenge course that starts tomorrow, on intuitive eating. Short videos and a meditation for seven days. It's all part of the same approach and it's likely to help me be focused. I really liked something that came up in a teaser podcast for this course: "It's not about self-control, it's about self-care".  Yeah, baby! I've learned a lot this year about self love and self care, and I think I may be reaching a real tipping point here in my relationship to eating. I'll let you know how it goes.